


How Jonathan Acquired the Key to Hamunaptra

by tinydooms



Category: The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Series
Genre: Bar fights, First Meetings, Gen, General Drunkenness, Grief, Pre-Canon, WW1 trauma, and not in healthy ways, veterans dealing with stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28900764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinydooms/pseuds/tinydooms
Summary: "Jonathan, you stole it from a drunk at the local casbah!""Picked his pocket, actually."
Comments: 10
Kudos: 20





	How Jonathan Acquired the Key to Hamunaptra

**How Jonathan Acquired the Key to Hamunaptra**

_Cairo, October 1922_

Thievery was not the plan of the evening when Jonathan went out that fateful night. He only wanted to get a little jazzed after a stressful and frankly disappointing dig down at the Valley of the Kings. Ordinarily Jonathan enjoyed going on digs; they had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember, but this one had been ridiculous from the start, run by an egomaniacal amateur with more money than sense and with an entirely incompentant team of inexperienced posh boys. After only a fortnight in this difficult company, Jonathan had cut his losses and quit, taking the first train back to Cairo. It would have been easy enough to get onto another dig down in Luxor, but the thought of staying put didn’t sit well and so here he was, back in Cairo, turned up at Evie’s little Fort Brydon flat like some kind of prodigal son and feeling just as wretched. Hence, booze. 

It hadn’t always been like this, Jonathan thought glumly, sliding onto a stool in a not-quite-seedy bar at the edge of Old Cairo. Before the War he had loved excavation, taking his time cleaning artefacts on his parents’ digs, more than happy to muck in and unearth history. Even after the War, settling down at a table of ancient odds and ends had been immensely soothing. But now that his parents were gone, lost two years ago when their plane went down over the Red Sea, everything had changed. Jonathan had been knocked sideways by their loss. Without his parents there, the horrors of the War were creeping back and it was getting steadily more difficult to focus on work. And Jonathan _wanted_ to work; it was the only thing that brought him peace. But he couldn’t. 

Jonathan ordered a double whiskey and knocked it back. The alcohol warmed him; that was better. He ordered another and leaned his elbows on the bar, looking around. 

The bar, though just this side of reputable, was teeming with Europeans, all of them probably on the prowl for the kind of run-down place containing mysterious sheiks and veiled maidens and romantic heroes that they read about in the pulps. Rich idiots like Dickie Fanshaw over there mixed with the supposedly lower orders. One of those sat just down the bar from Jonathan, a tall man with overlong brown hair and a glum face who leaned on his arm, spinning something between his fingers, refilling his glass from the bottle of vodka on the counter beside him. He looked as lost as Jonathan felt. 

Dickie Fanshaw wasn’t lost. He and his friends were already well-sozzled, though it wasn’t that late in the evening, and were singing school songs at the tops of their voices, uncaring of what the other patrons thought. Some things never changed. Jonathan had known Fanshaw at Oxford; the man was a git. The big man beside Jonathan gave them an irritated glace and poured himself more vodka. Jonathan snorted. 

“Bloody tourists, eh?” he said, and the man smiled without humor, a barring of the teeth. 

“Yeah,” he said in an American accent, and knocked back his drink. “Assholes.”

“Quite.” 

As Jonathan watched, the American spun his toy around again, letting it whirl to a rattling stop on the countertop. Something about it caught Jonathan’s eye. It was a strange trinket, obviously an antiquity, probably New Kingdom by the look of it: a hexagonal box with the cartouche of Seti I engraved on the top, and various symbols around its sides. Jonathan looked over its owner again.

He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered with a two-day beard, wearing clothes that were old and worn, but had once been of good quality. His tan bespoke of a lifetime out of doors. Some kind of laborer? No, that had been a decent suit when it was new. Sensing Jonathan’s eyes on him, the man looked over with a scowl that didn’t quite hide the misery in his eyes. 

“Interesting trinket, that,” Jonathan said, nodding at the little box. “Carnahan,” he added, holding out his hand. 

The American raised an eyebrow, but shook. “O’Connell.”

“Are you in the antiquities business, Mr. O’Connell?”

“Not since the War,” the other man said, knocking back another shot of vodka. The bottle was empty; how he was still upright and looking sober was beyond Jonathan. He’d have been unconscious by now. 

“Ah.”

So here was another veteran. Not surprising, really; Egypt was full of them. Jonathan raised his finger at the bartender and ordered them a round of drinks. Maybe he could get this bloke to sell him the thing. Evie would like it and maybe it was worth something. 

“You were with the American Army?” Jonathan asked when the drinks arrived. 

O’Connell shook his head. “Foreign Legion.”

Well, that was terrifying. Everyone knew the French Foreign Legion to be full of cutthroats and brigands, more rigorously trained than any other fighting force in existence. 

“That’s where you found that thing?” He nodded at the box again. 

O’Connell palmed it off the counter and stuck it in his jacket pocket. “You could say that.”

Not much of a talker, this one. Hm. Jonathan drank more whiskey; the room was beginning to be pleasantly hazy. O’Connell ordered himself another round of vodka and slumped against the counter. 

“Fuck,” he said to no one in particular. 

“Amen,” Jonathan agreed. 

“Fucking War. Stupid, stupid, stupid thing.” O’Connell ran a shaking hand over his face and Jonathan realized that he was well and truly three sheets to the wind. Maybe it would be easy to buy that thing off of the American. Jonathan was only a little tipsy in comparison.

“I say,” he began, and then a lot of things happened at once. 

Dickie Fanshaw swaggered up to the bar, calling out for more whiskey. None too sober himself, he stumbled and knocked into O’Connell, spilling the big man’s drink over themselves. O’Connell snarled, shaking vodka from his hands. Fanshaw looked him up and down. 

“You bloody idiot,” he said. “How dare you trip me?”

O’Connell raised an eyebrow. _“You_ knocked into _me.”_

“Don’t be absurd; an Englishman never trips. What do you have to say for yourself, you ignorant lout?”

“Fuck off,” O’Connell said, turning away. 

Jonathan snorted into his glass; Fanshaw was a first-class bully and certainly no one had ever dared speak to him like this. For a moment he was speechless with outrage. Then, grabbing O’Connell’s arm, he tried to drag the American from his chair. 

“What did you say to me?” he shouted. “ _What_ did you _say_ , you great lummox?!”

O’Connell shook him off like a dog with a rabbit. “I said,” he replied, his voice loud and succinct, _“fuck off!”_

Two of Dickie’s henchmen arrived, standing behind him, waiting to see what they should do. Jonathan drained his glass and sat back, rather enjoying the show. Whatever happened, it was going to be good. 

“How dare you speak to your better in such a way,” Fanshaw said, oozing disdain. “I ought to beat you for that.”

O’Connell rose to his feet, slow and dangerous. He stood a head taller than Fanshaw. “You’re welcome to try,” he said. 

Fanshaw, unused to being challenged, fell back a step. Unwilling, however, to give ground and with his friends waiting to see what he would do, he curled his lip at O’Connell. 

“Look at this great fool, gentlemen,” he said to his friends, “he probably learned this disrespect from his whore of a mother.”

Jonathan felt his jaw drop; that was low even for Dickie, and it was definitely the wrong thing to say. O’Connell’s face crumpled in on itself in rage; in a fluid movement he raised his fist and punched Fanshaw in the face, sending him flying into a nearby table. 

“Say that again,” he said, “I _dare_ you.”

In the split second before Fanshaw’s friends jumped at him and the brawl started in earnest, Jonathan slid off his bench and brushed past them, heading to the door. As much as he wanted to see Fanshaw’s arse handed back to him, he wanted to do it from a safe place. And besides, now he didn’t have to spend any money on O’Connell’s trinket. The American hadn’t even noticed it being taken from his pocket. 

Fanshaw was screeching, blood streaming from his nose, and his friends were charging O’Connell, who started swearing and throwing them. A table smashed, then another, patrons scattering and the barkeep yelling. From his post by the door, Jonathan cheered O’Connell on, weaving a little with whiskey and bloodlust. Fanshaw had often said rude things about Jonathan’s mother, too, but Jonathan had never quite had the courage to do anything about it. 

It was not a fair fight; three against one, but O’Connell didn’t seem to be having much trouble. He swung his fists, screaming, hurling Englishmen around. With a tinkling of glass, Fanshaw went out through the window. 

“Serves you right!” Jonathan shouted at him as Fanshaw sat up, groaning. 

But it was time to go: police whistles cut through the night, and Jonathan had no intention of getting caught up by them. 

“Police!” he shouted into the bar (O’Connell deserved a fair warning) and walked away from the building. 

A street away, Jonathan paused under a gas lamp to look at the trinket he’d swiped from O’Connell. Maybe he was drunker than he’d thought, but he couldn’t read the hieroglyphs. Best get it to Evie. Jonathan walked off into the night, never thinking for a moment what he was about to unleash. 

Author's Note: this was written to a prompt over on Tumblr, expanding on an ask that I had a while back, [wondering what my thoughts were on why Rick was in prison. I hope you like it! ](https://tinydooms.tumblr.com/post/632557857573912576/why-do-you-think-rick-was-in-prison)


End file.
